Indus script

The Indus script (also known as the Harappan script) is a corpus of symbols produced by the Indus Valley Civilisation during the Kot Diji and Mature Harappan periods between 3500 and 1900 BCE. Most inscriptions containing these symbols are extremely short, making it difficult to judge whether or not these symbols constituted a script used to record a language, or even symbolise a writing system.[4] In spite of many attempts,[5] ‘the script’ has not yet been deciphered, but efforts are ongoing. There is no known bilingual inscription to help decipher the script, and the script shows no significant changes over time. However, some of the syntax (if that is what it may be termed) varies depending upon location.[4]

The first publication of a seal with Harappan symbols dates to 1875, in a drawing by Alexander Cunningham.[6] Since then, over 4,000 inscribed objects have been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia. In the early 1970s, Iravatham Mahadevan published a corpus and concordance of Indus inscriptions listing 3,700 seals and 417 distinct signs in specific patterns. He also found that the average inscription contained five symbols and that the longest inscription contained only 14 symbols in a single line.[7]

After 1900 BCE, the systematic use of the symbols ended, after the final stage of the Mature Harappan civilization. A few Harappan signs have been claimed to appear until as late as around 1100 BCE, the beginning of the Iron Age in India. Onshore explorations near Bet Dwarka in Gujarat revealed the presence of late Indus seals depicting a three-headed animal, an earthen vessel inscribed in what is claimed to be a late Harappan script and a large quantity of pottery. The thermoluminescence date for the pottery is 1528 BCE. That evidence has been used to claim that a late Harappan script was used until around 1500 BCE.[23]

The characters are largely pictorial but include many abstract signs. The inscriptions are thought to have been written mostly from right-to-left (because there are several instances of the symbols being compressed on the left side, as if the writer is running out of space at the end of the row there), but they sometimes follow a boustrophedonic style. The number of principal signs is about 400. Since that is considered too large a number for each character to be a phonogram, the script is generally believed to instead be logo-syllabic.

An opposing hypothesis that has been offered by Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, is that these symbols are nonlinguistic signs, which symbolise families, clans, gods, and religious concepts and are similar to components of coats of arms or totem poles.[24] In a 2004 article, Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel presented a number of arguments stating that the Indus script is nonlinguistic. The main ones are the extreme brevity of the inscriptions, the existence of too many rare signs (which increase over the 700-year period of the Mature Harappan civilization) and the lack of the random-looking sign repetition that is typical of language.[25]

Asko Parpola, reviewing the Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel thesis in 2005, stated that their arguments "can be easily controverted".[26] He cited the presence of a large number of rare signs in Chinese and emphasised that there was "little reason for sign repetition in short seal texts written in an early logo-syllabic script". Revisiting the question in a 2007 lecture,[27] Parpola took on each of the 10 main arguments of Farmer et al., presenting counterarguments for each.

A 2009 paper[28] published by Rajesh P N Rao, Iravatham Mahadevan and others in the journal Science also challenged the argument that the Indus script might have been a nonlinguistic symbol system. The paper concluded that the conditional entropy of Indus inscriptions closely matched those of linguistic systems like the Sumerian logo-syllabic system, Rig Vedic Sanskrit etc., but they are careful to stress that by itself does not imply that the script is linguistic. A follow-up study presented further evidence in terms of entropies of longer sequences of symbols beyond pairs.[29]
However, Sproat claimed that there existed a number of misunderstandings in Rao et al., including a lack of discriminative power in their model, and argued that applying their model to known non-linguistic systems such as Mesopotamian deity symbols produced similar results to the Indus script. Rao et al.'s argument against Sproat's claims and Sproat's reply were published in Computational Linguistics in December 2010.[30] The June 2014 issue of Language carries a paper by Sproat that provides further evidence that the methodology of Rao et al. is flawed.[31] Rao et al.'s rebuttal of Sproat's 2014 article and Sproat's response are published in the December 2015 issue of Language.[32][33]

Over the years, numerous decipherments have been proposed, but there is no established scholarly consensus.[34] The following factors are usually regarded as the biggest obstacles for a successful decipherment:

The underlying language has not been identified though some 300 loanwords in the Rigveda are a good starting point for comparison.[35][36]

The average length of the inscriptions is less than five signs, the longest being only 26 signs long[37], although recent findings have revealed copper plates belonging to the mature Harappan period, one of them having 34 characters inscribed onto it.[38]

The Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov suggested, based on computer analysis, the Dravidian language as the most likely candidate for the underlying language of the script.[40] Knorozov's suggestion was preceded by the work of Henry Heras, who also suggested several readings of signs based on a proto-Dravidian assumption.[41]

The Finnish scholar Asko Parpola wrote that the Indus script and Harappan language "most likely belonged to the Dravidian family".[42] Parpola led a Finnish team in the 1960s-80s that, like Knorozov's Soviet team worked towards investigating the inscriptions using computer analysis. Based on a proto-Dravidian assumption, the teams proposed readings of many signs. A number of people agreed with the suggested readings of Heras and Knorozov. One such reading was legitimised when the Dravidian word for both 'fish' and 'star', "min" was hinted at through drawings of both the things together on Harappan seals.[43] A comprehensive description of Parpola's work until 1994 is given in his book Deciphering the Indus Script.[44]

Iravatham Mahadevan, another historian who supports the Dravidian hypothesis, says, "we may hopefully find that the proto-Dravidian roots of the Harappan language and South Indian Dravidian languages are similar. This is a hypothesis [...] But I have no illusions that I will decipher the Indus script, nor do I have any regret".[45] Commenting on his 2014 publication Dravidian Proof of the Indus Script via The Rig Veda: A Case Study, Mahadevan claims to have made significant progress in deciphering the script as Dravidian.[46] According to Mahadevan, a stone celt discovered in Mayiladuthurai (Tamil Nadu) has the same markings as that of the symbols of the Indus script. The celt dates to early 2nd millennium BCE, post-dating Harappan decline. Mahadevan considers this as evidence of the same language being used by the neolithic people of south India and the late Harappans.[47][48]

Indian archaeologist Shikaripura Ranganatha Rao claimed to have deciphered the Indus script. He compared it to the Phoenician alphabet, and assigned sound values based on this comparison. His decipherment results in a "Sanskritic" reading, including the numerals aeka, tra, chatus, panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa, sata (1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12, 100).[50] He also noted a number of striking similarities in shape and form between the late Harappan characters and the Phoenician letters, arguing that the Phoenician script evolved from the Harappan script, and not, as the classical theory suggests from the Proto-Sinaitic script.[51]

John E. Mitchiner dismissed some of these attempts at decipherment. Mitchiner mentioned that "a more soundly-based but still greatly subjective and unconvincing attempt to discern an Indo-European basis in the script has been that of Rao".[52]

There have been several hypotheses regarding the language pertaining to the Indus Script. One of the most common ones has been that the script belongs to the Indo-Aryan language. However, there are many problems with this hypothesis. A major one includes: Since the people belonging to the Indo-European cultures were always on the move, horses played a very important role in their lives or as Parpola put it, "There is no escape from the fact that the horse played a central role in the Vedic and Iranian cultures..." (Parpola, 1986). However, no depiction of horses on seals nor any remains of horses have been found in the subcontinent before 2000 BCE. Thus, it is very likely there were no Aryan speakers present before 2000 BCE in the Indus Valley.

A second, though not as popular hypothesis is that the Indus script belongs to the Munda family of languages. The Munda family of languages is spoken largely in Eastern India, and is related to some Southeast Asian languages. However, much like the Indo-Aryan language, the reconstructed vocabulary of early Munda does not reflect the Harappan culture. Therefore, its candidacy for being the language of the Indus Civilization is dim.[53]

Scholars also compare the Indus valley script with a writing system from ancient Persia, known as Linear Elamite. The two languages were contemporary to each other. Scholars gained knowledge of the Elamite language from a bilingual monument called the Table of the Lion in the Louvre museum. The monument contained the same text in Akkadian, a known writing system, and in Linear Elamite. On comparing this ancient language to the Indus script, a number of similar symbols have been found.[54]

The Dholavira signboard is one of the longest in the Indus script, with one symbol appearing four times, and this and its large size and public nature make it a key piece of evidence cited by scholars arguing that the Indus script represents full literacy.

The Indus symbols have been assigned the ISO 15924 code "Inds". The script was proposed for encoding in Unicode's Supplementary Multilingual Plane in 1999; however, the Unicode Consortium still lists the proposal in pending status.[55] At the International Conference on Mohenjodaro and Indus Valley Civilisation 2017 it was noted that two language engineers, Amar Fayaz Buriro and Shabir Kumbhar have engineered all 1839 signs of Indus script and presented a developed font.[56][57]

^M. Witzel underlines the prefixing nature of these words and calls them Para-Munda, a language related to but not belonging to Proto-Munda; see:
Witzel, M. Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Ṛgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic), EJVS Vol. 5,1, 1999, 1-67